The Sum of Man
by Qismat Qami
Summary: -AU, R27, yaoi, mature content.- "Will you suck it? Suckle it? Swallow it down?"


**Warnings:** Future-AU, Slash/Yaoi, masturbation

**Characters:** Reborn/Tsuna

**Rating:** Mature

**Disclaimer:** Owned by Amano Akira, et al.

**Summary:** "Will you suck it? Suckle it? Swallow it down?"

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**A/N:** Be forewarned—this is a peculiar child of a peculiar brain. Whether the reader may find anything worthy of approbation, the author cannot say—except that zie hopes the reader will show enough human respect and dignity to refrain from sacrificing zir upon the alter of the reader's indignation. Thank you most kindly for your time and for, if you may be so inclined, a memento of your visit in the form of a review. The author is, as always, the humble and pitiable servant of your entertainment.

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::The Sum of Man::

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~Summer – 27~

_Will you suck it? Suckle it? Swallow it down?_

_Will it tease you and please you or make you frown?_

There are things to do and things to be done, but the heat sliding into his flesh—sticky-slick summer torture—steals away the will to do ought but loaf upon the tangled, sweat-tacky sheets of his bed and breathe in the pulse of life rising from his skin. Breathe in the odor of his enervated body. Breathe out the waste of an afternoon alone.

Consciously unconscious he tests the pliancy of his flat stomach with a fingertip, draws forgotten equations and delicate confessions, and skims across the path of fine hairs below his navel. A slow, liquid pulse moves through his body. His breath catches. He wavers, indecisive, expectant, hesitant and recklessly bold. Tantalizing and tart, he tastes the thrill of the Natural, the impulse of the animal, and the dark promise of the masculine. He anticipates. He quivers.

He touches.

Gently, gently now. Just a fingertip, just there at the edge of the forbidden, a barrier of rucked cloth, sharp hipbones, smooth skin, wiry hairs.

Heat. Sweat. Summer hot and heavy in his mouth, across his longing tongue, he passes below into shadows and secret, humid warmth. Oh!

Small gasp, a noise lost in a puff of startled air. Damp silk stretched taut and firm beneath his fingers. Throbbing heart, molten rushing plunge. Eye closed, teeth sharp upon a bottom lip, cheek pressed into the sour-musk of the heat-wet pillow, he stumbles into that bitingly, achingly, deliciously fervent free fall and rides the sweet constriction of his fist.

There it is. There it is.

On his side, heels sliding on and digging into the mattress. Flushed, glistening, burning with a singular flame. Moving with the twisting, licking heat in his belly. Harsh breaths. Harsher strokes.

Ah.

Tighter. Rougher. Harder. Wrist aching, body folding. Hot and wet and moaning. Pushing into it. _Pushing into it_. Sweet, slick tunnel. Calloused fingers. Frayed blue boxers. Rubbing and pulling. Muscles straining.

His thighs tremble. His back arches. His ass clenches.

Everything unravels into white hot threads. Spinning and spinning and spinning away from him.

He drops into himself, bereft.

Sticky, messy, drained, he gasps into the damp pillow. Sucks down the stink of exertion, fills his lungs with it. Trembling, vaguely hungry, he uncurls, emerges from the deliciously poisonous enchantment, opens his eyes to a sun-drenched room.

He sucks the bitter, slimy salt from his fingers.

Alone still.

Still wanting.

* * *

~Autumn – R27~

The glass rattles in its pane as another gust of wind-born rain whips around the side of the manor and rushes, keening, into the wild night. Ancient timbers groan dolefully against the storm's persistence. Far off in the ink-black a pair of headlights cuts through the torrential downpour. Reborn lets the thick linen curtain slip through his fingers and fall back to cover the silver streaks of rain against the mullioned window.

"Should I make it so you can never leave?" he wonders aloud, dark eyes cutting to the figure captured in a pool of soft lamplight. Endlessly reflective copper eyes regard him curiously before dropping back down to the reams of reports scattered atop a scarred oak desk.

"You mean you haven't done that already?"

The gold-plated nib of the young man's pen scratches against the thick paper as he irreverently scrawls out the calligraphy of his name. A dangerous flavor of intimacy spices the air about them, electric with potential. Quiet and cloistered, filled with clinging silken shadows, the room exhales centuries of life, centuries of storms. It's almost as if the rest of the great manor, with its maze of corridors and rooms, has been softly, tenderly swallowed by the evening, by the tempest beyond the straining walls.

Footsteps muffled by the thick weave of the antique rug spread upon the wood floor to ward off the deepening autumn chill, he returns to the young man's side. Beneath tailored white wool, the Vongola heir's shoulders tense, anticipatory; the pen continues to stitch black marks across the documents.

Even now, with thirty precise centimeters between them, he can feel the warmth rising from the young man's lean body, can smell it—raw milk and black tea. It's as familiar as the weight of his gun in his hand, as the odor of blood and hot metal in his nose, on his tongue. Familiar, yes, but not comforting.

No, the familiarity of his former student's presence leaves him restless, makes him feel peculiarly caged within the limits and confines of his own body—unsettled, as if he does not quite fit in it anymore; as if he has borrowed someone else's suit, someone else's skin. How annoying.

"Ow! Reborn, what was that for?"

Three tawny brown hairs drift through the buttery glow of the lamp and settle somewhere off in the shadows closing in on the two men. Well, he amends wryly, one man and one adolescent.

"Hurry up. A power outage won't excuse you from finishing." His fingertips throb with the memory of the heat rising from the other's bowed head.

"We have backup generators," the young man says, rubbing absently at the place from whence Reborn plucked those three soft hairs. Deep within the storm-ravished night, lightning dances down to the earth and thunder growls, full-throated.

A thought, delicious and mercurial, swims through his mind: what if the backup generators refuse to turn over? What if all that remains is darkness? Darkness and the storm and the two of them here alone in this room with only four blind walls and furniture to guess at what transpires. This idea pulses invitingly at the back of his mind and languidly beckons him towards further consideration.

"What comes between two people but allows everything?"

Vertebrae pop as the young man twists around in the leather-back chair to face his former tutor, no doubt furnishing his lips with some caustic remark. Language perishes in its infancy. Perhaps something of the hitman's mind has slipped through to fill his dark eyes with banked heat for the Vongola heir's own widen—and it is only when the younger is seated that their gazes can meet with such provocative equality.

The young man swallows, a wash of pink flooding his cheeks and traveling down the lean column of his neck. Reborn's eyes follow the spreading color until the partially opened collar of the heir's shirt hides all from view. He draws his gaze back up, reversing the intriguing course of the young man's blush, and meets the bemused look in the other's eyes.

"Reborn?"

And the lights cut out.

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~Winter – R27~

The world has become a twilight-blue dream of snow and silence. Everything is muffled, sleeping and oh-so cold beyond the bedroom window. Noiselessly, large, lacy flakes describe lazy curlicues as they glide down upon the growing drifts and fill in the deep-cut tire tracks of a black Benz that has skidded off the road, its front now crushed against the frozen trunk of a long dead tree.

Shivering slightly even beneath layers of comforters, Tsuna searches for the switch of somnolence. Even with muscles aching from a forced hike through thigh-high piles of glittering, chilling white to a stranger's house, he cannot drift off. His mind is still clicking away, still full of worries and considerations.

And thoughts.

Thoughts that make his heart feel weighted and awkward in his chest and his skin prickle with unwanted awareness—awareness of the other occupant in this borrowed bed. Something has been growing like a strange, exotic plant of possibility between Reborn and himself over the past decade, ever since the Arcobaleno's curse was partially broken; something that has the potential to be immeasurably painful, frighteningly pleasurable and wholly dangerous. Even, perhaps, fatal.

He curls deeper into the bedding, hoping against hope not to disturb the thirteen-year-old-sized hitman slumbering thirty precise centimeters away. Outside the room he can hear their aged hostess shuffling about. Arthritic joints popping now and then, lungs struggling with years of tobacco use, she stays up waiting for a son who has been gone for over forty years. A door opens and closes, and everything sinks back under the embrace of this snowy winter's night; quiet now, save for the soft rushing sound of the kerosene heater in the corner and Reborn's near-soundless breaths behind his back.

Yes, something has been growing in that carefully controlled distance, both physical and emotional, the hitman maintains between the two of them. For the life of him, Tsuna cannot put a name to it, cannot even perceive it clearly. It only silkily brushes against his intuition every now and then, like the faintest kiss of a moth's powdery wing, when he catches a certain shuttered look in the other's ash-black eyes. That look used to mean that the Arcobaleno was planning some form of inevitably humiliating test or exercise to inflict up Tsuna's hapless person. Now though… Now he's not sure how to interpret it.

And that bothers him.

They are no longer student and tutor—or, perhaps, victim and torturer would be more apt?—and Tsuna would never be so presumptuous as to think of himself as an equal much less the Italian's superior; not even "colleague" can satisfactorily occupy that liminal, unknowable space between.

He sucks in a lungful of chill air and expels it slowly, focusing all his attention to the deliberate deflation of his lungs. Even with several layers of down comforters piled on top, winter's fingers still slip through and stroke his skin into goose bumps. Even the furnace-hot heat of the hitman's body at his back cannot penetrate the scant distance between them, cannot enter his flesh or quiet his mind.

It's rather lonely sharing a bed like this with someone, he muses wryly.

"Idiot."

He flinches, muscle snapping to wire-taut tenseness, eyes squeezing even more tightly closed. Ah, forgot about the mind reading thing.

Cloth rustles against like, and he suddenly finds himself with a lithe, warm body along the curve of his back. He's too startled to shiver, to make a noise. A strong, slender arm curls over his side, small hand locking in place over his heart. Against his spine he can feel the steady drum of the other's heart, feel the thin chest expanding and contracting with measured breaths that tickle the hairs at his nape.

"Reborn?"

"Go to sleep, Tsuna."

* * *

~Spring – R27~

_What comes between two people but allows everything?_

Two mouths meeting, softly, wetly. Fingers and nails dancing over clinging cloth and yielding flesh. Beat, beat, beating hearts. Rain falling all around. Pounding rhythm.

He feeds—feeds on the moist, desperate sounds sliding out of the other's throat, on the voluptuously inexperienced tongue testing its daring against his honey-slow invasion, on the bittersweet musk rising from their skin. He drinks—drinks in the salt-sour of exertion and the crisp-slick of the spring storm. He devours and eats with his senses, gorging himself on the other's immolating existence.

On his toes, fingers tangled in a helplessly disordered and thoroughly drenched riot of brown hair, he hauls the other down to meet him, to meet the rapacious hunger, hot and wet, filing his mouth. Moving and pumping. Sucking and suckling. Seeking, finding, teasing.

A carnal, obliterating fuck of a kiss.

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~End~

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A/N: The original riddle is, if the author's memory serves correctly, "What comes between a man and a woman but allows everything?" However, due to the nature of this piece, zie changed it to be more yaoi accessible. The answer is "a kiss," which is also the "it" of the first series of italicized questions--in case anyone was curious. Probably not… oh well…

The author also apologizes for the lack of Leon in this fic. Just pretend he's--uh--lying low for the sake of his master's love life...


End file.
